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US Intelligence Chief Defends Attempts To Break Tor
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Arik Hesseldahl writes that James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, says that the NSA tried to penetrate and compromise Tor, but it was only because terrorists and criminals use it, too and our "interest in online anonymity services and other online communication and networking tools is based on the undeniable fact that these are the tools our adversaries use to communicate and coordinate attacks against the United States and our allies." It was all legal and appropriate, Clapper argues, because, "Within our lawful mission to collect foreign intelligence to protect the United States, we use every intelligence tool available to understand the intent of our foreign adversaries so that we can disrupt their plans and prevent them from bringing harm to innocent Americans. Our adversaries have the ability to hide their messages and discussions among those of innocent people around the world. They use the very same social networking sites, encryption tools and other security features that protect our daily online activities." Clapper concludes that "the reality is that the men and women at the National Security Agency and across the Intelligence Community are abiding by the law, respecting the rights of citizens and doing everything they can to help keep our nation safe.""
and I don't even live in the states
The people that work in the NSA are a bunch or criminals. From the top leaders down to the last analyst.
They're undermining democracy this is the reality. The few good men that worked there and that tried to expose all the illegal acts going on (including of course Snowden) were ostracized, kicked out and prosecuted.
Fuck them, Osama should have droped a couple of 747s on their HQ instead of the WTC. He'd done a great service to democracy.
The rest of the world just sees the US committing hostile acts on every citizen of the planet, and also that the US is undermining freedom and communication across the world. You have to stop what you're doing, because you're wrecking everything, and your "justifications" are hollow.
Stop it.
Now.
James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, says that...the NSA tried to penetrate and compromise Tor, but it was only because terrorists and criminals use it, too...
Well, he's right. As far as that goes. Trouble is, there's a disconnect between investigating terrorists/other criminals and wholesale spying on honest citizens. One can only suppose the term "honest citizen" is a term entirely alien to their comprehension...
In a combined statement the FBI, DEA, and Homeland Security announce a startling discovery: terrorists and criminals use cash. As a result, law enforcement agencies are seizing cash and "near cash" equivalents such as bank accounts from all US residents. Quoting law enforcement officials, "We have only just learned that cash can be used for criminal and terrorist activities. We hope the public understands the eminent danger of these systems and cooperates with these seizures. Our goal is always to prevent harm to the public and once we learned that cash was used by nearly 100% of all terrorist and criminal activities in some form or another we knew we needed to act."
I wouldn't trust Tor at all if national intelligence agencies didn't expend considerable resources to break it. Competition is what drives this technology forward.
What dilemma? Freedom has responsibilities, and so does protection of privacy and rights.
These "justifications" are just B.S. designed to ramp up fear so funding gets extended.
You are all being played as suckers and you really should think about taking your country back.
Also, any so-called "IT" staff that go along to implement this - you are collaborators of the worst kind, shame on you.
Why?
Actually, a better "analogy" is that they work hard on making sure that cash can't be used anonymously. Each transaction must be monitored (serial numbers on every bill, cameras in every ATM and store), and controlled (demanding proof of ownership for depositing cash at a bank, removing the possibility to actually use cash for buying travel documents).
Much like they are working hard on trying to make sure Tor can't be used anonymously.
c++;
The same argument can be made about cars, trucks, planes, trains, fertilizer, guns, etc. It's not IT specific.
Also, thinking about prior art is willful infringement. This one goes to 11. Don't even look at it.
The same thing can be said for opening all the letters, listening to all the phone calls since the postal office actually allows anonymous letters and the phone companies anonymous calls. Some even operate anonymous public phone booths, the bastards!
To put it another way: free speech means some folks will say things that match your opinion (a "good" thing!), but sometimes, they dare to say stuff you don't agree with! And the latter can't be allowed.
Or, for the mandatory vehicular analogy, a car can be used to bring kittens to an orphanage, or to plow into an orphan on the street and splatter it over the pavement.
That's not a problem with the tool but with the user. And the reason James Clapper here wants to forbid you to use encryption is pretty nefarious, even if he claims to want only "your good". So he and his agency should first learn to behave before telling us what to do.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Anyone else feel that is NSA says they tried to compromise Tor but didn't, that means they know someone's about to release something that shows they were working on it.. and I'd guess they have not failed.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
The automobile has brought more harm to innocent people than Tor ever will. Every technology has unintended consequences.
Our government explicitly says, privacy is a threat to our safety, and it is the duty of our government to prevent privacy from being possible at all costs.
Go ahead, people. Keep voting for the republicans, because at least they are not democrats. Oh, I mean, keep voting for democrats, because at least they are not republicans. NOTHING is going to change that way. They'll keep boning us up the ass with this "oh noooo... can't have privacy.... TARE! Fnord! War on TARE!!!!"
Actually y'know what? Fuck y'all. YOU are responsible for this. Not me. I have not voted for either major party in DECADES. YOU... YOU are responsible for allowing this to happen. YOU have gotten the government you deserve, you half-wits. Sadly, I am the one who has to suffer for you turds voting for the jackasses (Bush, Obama, whatever) who allow and enable shit like this.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
... just as soon as he's done serving his sentence for perjuring himself in front of Congress.
" But on the other horn, there really are people out there who will use these technologies to bring harm to innocent people--for the greater good, of course (or for a profit). These people will use technology against our best wishes."
There's no use for Tor that is against my interests. None. It's just speech going down wires. You may not like the kiddie diddlers discussing their kiddy diddling, or the terrorists discussing.... well nothing, because terrorists have no reason to use it... but its all just speech. Acts are not speech, people like Clapper pretend that saying things terrorists might say is the same as committing an *act* of terrorism.
" are abiding by the law, respecting the rights of citizens and doing everything they can to help keep our nation safe"
No they're not. They hacked domestic communications on Tor too. No political candidate exists now that doesn't have an NSA folder full of their dirty secrets. Which means that liars like Clapper can/have been shaping US politics to be pro-military. They've certainly been interfering in Europe's politics, EU Commission pretending that US spying on Europe is a US *domestic* issue, FFS.
If you accept that democracy is the basis for stable countries, then he's destabilized the US.
Safe? Safe from a free democracy?? That's what General Alexander has done.
You can see it when the ex NSA Chief dresses up in military garb and jokes about killing critics. You can see how far away from a free democracy you've gone.
And that is the price of freedom. Some will abuse it. There is no moral dilemma; you don't compromise others rights for some imaginary sense of security. .
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've got news for you, friend. Information has never harmed a single soul. It takes action to do that. Information doesn't kill people, people do. The NSA does not preempt terrorist threats, and even if they did, the cost to the rest of our lives is too much. They've inundated themselves with data and can't make sense of any of it until after the actions have been performed. Besides, folks could just send post cards with stenographic messages on them, or any other low-tech solution. Tor and darknets wouldn't need to exist if we didn't feel insecure.
More folks die of heart disease every year than over fifty 9/11's... 2,996 died in 9/11. 597,689. Two Hundred Times More, Every Year! If the NSA wanted to protect us they'd be making tastier health food. Over six times more Americans take their own lives every year than the Terrorists did in their worst attack against us. The threat is fucking pathetic, and those spreading the fear narrative should be fired. Humans have deep psychological, evolutionarily encoded, desires to protect our lives and those of women and children even more. This is psychological warfare.
I know it sounds cold hearted, but we can put a price on a human life. We can look at the lifespan and the benefit to society that life may contribute, and quantify a life to some degree. This is not to dehumanize people, but to put into perspective the ethics of fearmongering. A few thousand died at the hands of terrorists, but now hundreds of millions suffer every day at their loss of privacy. The aggregate suffering is far greater than that of the worst tortures to the few. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. IMO, It's better not to live in fear of your government for your entire life than to say, lose a limb. I would give up my left leg to end this NSA spying on me, and all Americans. What I really fear that they are turning more people against us every day!
Privacy is worth something. We need private space to be fully human, and as our lives deal more and more online that privacy needs to be extended online as well. Folks wouldn't be encrypting shit if they felt they could trust the networks.
The NSA is wounding us deeply. Their actions make them seem like the other secret police we fought against. We didn't need such a police state since we were brave and good people. Soldiers took up the call to fight for our nation because we had honor. The NSA is stripping away our honor. Many would not fight for us because of it. The NSA is a Threat to National Security. These fearmongers are injecting poison into the veins of our country. They will not ever decrease the dosage, and if we let them continue, they will increase it and destroy our great nation from the inside out.
Think for a second about the lengths we've got to because of the pathetic terrorist attacks. Now, what if the NSA really did try to protect us from real harms we face? The NSA would monitor everything you ate and tax you if you more if you ate "unhealthy" food, whatever they deem that to be. The NSA would be monitoring every vehicle location and remotely shutting folks down cars. They'd be preemptively sending cops into your home to make sure your bad-day didn't turn into a suicide.
We have secret ballots for a reason. The invasion of privacy must end.
"we use every intelligence tool available to understand the intent of our foreign adversaries" I do not think the word foreign means what you think it does. Foreign if you look it up in any dictionary and then apply it in context to the United States means non American citizens.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
The problem isn't that those who wants to harm us communicate in ways we have problems listening to. The problem is that they want to harm us.
Our efforts on listening in on everybody so we can classify more enemies creates more people who hate us.
When followed up with drone strikes on mere suspects not convicted of anything, and people who are guilty of being nearby, we really fuel the fire.
Yes, the thought that possible enemies are communicating without us being able to listen in burns us up. But when listening in creates animosity which grows to hatred, it's counter-productive.
You don't get fewer snakebites by digging every nearby hill to find dens, and poke the snakes to find out whether they're agressive or not. You leave them alone, knowing that they are out there, and some of them may be dangerous. Co-existing works. Paranoia doesn't.
He says they are. Now, give me one reason why I should believe him. Where's the oversight? Why should I trust him?
I'm in IT security myself, and "trust" is a big issue. Trust saves you time. If you trust an entity, you put some burden of security on someone else, the entity that you trust. E.g., you trust a CA and its issued certificates so you don't have to verify all the various certs out there yourself. We trust the CAs out of convenience and out of practicality. And in turn CAs are audited and checked constantly to ensure they are up to speed with their security. Still, security blunders happen. But at least there are means and ways to not only detect them but also to remedy them, and most importantly: It is your, and only your, decision whether or not you trust a CA. You can decide unilaterally to declare certs issued by one or even all CAs as untrustworthy for yourself (and yourself alone).
So we have oversight, security audition, breach discovery and unilateral opt-out (or even opt-in).
NONE of these features apply to the NSA. Hence there is exactly ZERO reason for me to trust that entity AT ALL, from a security point of view. I cannot audit them, I cannot determine the security of their setup, I cannot determine the actual scope of their work and most of all I cannot decide against trusting them.
Sorry, but there is no reason to trust him. On what? His word? Well, great, here's my word that I won't do anything stupid, dangerous or illegal. It's just as good as his. So he can stop spying on me now.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why would you listen to a convicted felon if you don't want to listen to one not convicted yet?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because shut up.
It only takes three words to sum up how untrustworthy the NSA is, "Pressure Cooker Backpack".
It is fascinating how there are so many initiatives to change the properties of the US government and the Constitution just because it has become harder for Republicans to win elections.
- Mark Levin's desire to add 11 new amendments to the Constitution.
- ALEC's efforts to repeal the 17th Amendment
- Movements in states to secede from the Union.
- Forcing students to vote in their home districts instead of where they live 9 months of the year.
- Requiring government-issued IDs less than a year old for voting, even as the offices that issue those IDs are being closed in poor and minority neighborhoods.
All because Republicans can't get a majority of Americans to vote for them*. It's even caused guys like Smitty to stop calling themselves Republican, hoping the stink of the Party of Reagan will somehow fade.
(*In the 2012 congressional elections, half a million more votes were cast for Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives than Republican, yet Republicans maintained a 234-195 seat majority. It was only because of red state gerrymandering that there is a Republican majority in the House, even as blue states move toward non-partisan drawing of congressional districts.)
You are welcome on my lawn.
Of course, because in National Socialist America, EVERYONE is a terrorist and a criminal.
It's impossible to rule a nation of innocents.
Gee, an organization tasked with intercepting and interpreting electronic communications wants to intercept and interpret electronic communications! Who woulda thunk it?
The NSA has certainly done a poor job keeping it's nose clean, but personally, I'd be rather disappointed if they weren't trying to de-anonymize Tor! Figuring out who is talking to who, and how often, called Signals Intelligence, is the bedrock of intelligence analysis (and has been even before the NSA existed), and in many ways is more important than knowing what they are saying.
In addition, if the NSA were to suddenly be hit with a clue-by-four by federal judges actually doing their job, they would need the de-anonymizing information to perform proper filtering of domestic communications.
Just who is deciding who is innocent? They decide who is innocent, and do so without the constitutionally guaranteed protections for the innocent.
...
I agree with the poster above and oppose the surveillance state.
Am I still innocent now? Was I ever?
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
I am not suggesting anything, nor defending any sort of monitoring. I'm saying that figuring out
exactly what is the best way to proceed is a hard problem, and the typical slashdotter seems to trivialize
it, ignoring the fact that both sides have drawbacks. It is completely different from "banning Tor is like
banning cars omg freedom! my feelings!".
I completely understand the mentality of "we need to allow some bad to happen because the good
we get in exchange outweighs the bad", but one needs to acknowledge that this *is* a tradeoff and
complete anonymity does not come for free in a society. Exactly how much the society has to pay,
in terms of bad guys getting away and evil being done, I doubt anyone knows. But the US has many
enemies and I don't think it's easy to predict what will happen if they stop monitoring.
Stop making enemies by meddling in other countries' affairs to suit your own selfish gains.
Because he would have paid his dues to society. Similarly, if I were in a hiring position I wouldn't ever hire someone who I knew had committed a felony and not get punished. But I might, depending on the job, hire a convicted felon.
Let us not forget disenfranchised ex-felons that have lost civil rights. That is an ever growing, largely liberal and poor block of potential voters. But, of course they are criminals, and shoul suffer forever.
Silence is a state of mime.
People misunderstand what a police state is. It isn't a country where the police strut around in jackboots; it's a country where the police can do anything they like.
Similarly, a security state is one in which the security establishment can do anything it likes.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
While I have no intention to collaborate with finding out private communications between US citizens, I don't see why the NSA would not try and break TOR. TOR is a communication system that would allow terrorists to communicate without being monitored, it is a job of a spy agency to get into those communication methods. It's like telling James Bond to not try to break into the safe of the bad guy to get the secret papers because, "breaking and entering is illegal and not nice".
There is nothing wrong with breaking TOR, because TOR doesn't deserve it's reputation if it can be broken. I'm glad that they've broken it and we know about it. I've always known that, while it had certain benefits, it has always been very susceptible to being compromised if you have enough assets and the will to do so. All they've done is proven it. Now we move on to something else, or we accept the caveats that working with TOR constrains us with.
I'm not worried about what they can do, I'm worried about what they do with their capabilities. The fact is that someone is going to be able to do what the NSA is doing, sooner or later. Let's make sure that it is the good guys who are doing it, and that those people who go into that field are responsible and honest people who understand the need for privacy in the course of normal events.
There's a difference between being a part of a system that you have no objective control over, and being complicit in specific activities that we have no way of having oversight over.
If I was a roofer on the Death Star, I might have no idea what the big crater looking thing was for. I'd think I was building a big battlestation, at best. Is it my fault that I didn't walk over to the other side of what was the size of a small moon and ask what they were building over there? Would I know a superlaser if I saw one? Hell no. I'm a roofer, not a turbolaser technician. I wouldn't know a superlaser from a thermal exhaust port.
The whole god damned world seems to be out to hurt the U.S if you listen to these people. The U.S is psyched up on its on self-entitlement and is behaving like a violent bully, and it's time the world comes together and stand up against it.
Signature intentionally left blank.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin
Actually, a better "analogy" is that they work hard on making sure that cash can't be used anonymously. Each transaction must be monitored
You know what the classic solution to all this is, right? Allow me a quote from a movie made a long time ago, called Enemy of the State;
Brill: In guerrilla warfare, you try to use your weaknesses as strengths.
Robert Clayton Dean: Such as?
Brill: Well, if they're big and you're small, then you're mobile and they're slow. You're hidden and they're exposed. You only fight battles you know you can win. That's the way the Vietcong did it. You capture their weapons and you use them against them the next time.
Guys... all their equipment is wired into the internet. A lot of it is the internet. And we're in a world where everything is increasingly interconnected and online all the time, everywhere. There's nothing they can do that we can't do too. They wanna watch us? We'll watch them. They wanna revoke passports overseas... I hope they don't plan on buying any plane tickets using credit cards. Frustrate them. Fuck with them.
Oh they'll call you a terrorist, they'll probably even throw in the word 'cyber' a lot, because they love cybering. But if you're good, and you're smart about it... they're gonna be hard-pressed to find you because you are one person in a target-rich environment. You can afford to pick and choose who, where, and when your engagements are. They can't. They're a fat blob of wires, ego, and data centers.
The NSA becoming this bloated piece of shit that tries to monitor everything is a major strategic weakness. They've moved off their primary focus. They've spread themselves too thin, trying to do too much at once, and this "NSA 2.0" they're rolling out has caused a previously impregnable organization to start leaking like a sieve. They're weak guys.
Let me be clear on this, because everyone's running around thinking the NSA is this unstoppable cyber super organization. They're fat, slow, and weak. They're exposed. It is just a matter of time before someone takes them to school on this. I'm not suggesting you do this. Or you. Or anyone. But the NSA has pissed off a lot of people, and we have enemies both foreign and domestic that want a little payback.
Well, meat's back on the menu guys. Anyone with an iota of tactical understanding realizes that when you try to be everything, everywhere, all the time... when you fight a protracted war... you exhaust your resources, your troops get tired, and then... then you lose.
The NSA is about to take a special kind of fall guys. Even if nobody gives them a helping push, they're going to collapse under their own weight. The intelligence cycle depends on timely analysis, accurate information, and good communication between analysts, management, and clients. Whenever you bloat up, communication increases exponentially, while the 'signal', the amount of useful information coming out, drops. We've all seen e-mail shitstorms in the office... there are intelligence community equivalents guys. The NSA is super-saturating itself and will render itself inert within a decade at the rate it is going... without any outside help whatsoever.
This isn't James Bond knowledge I'm working off of. There are people working at the NSA. And while I can't say what any one of them is doing, I know as a group that right now... it's a pressure-cooker environment. And if I had any way of validating that out there, I'd bet real money right now on it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Well, the biggest blue state of all, California, now has an independent commission draw legislative districts. Also Washington.
There are 37 states where legislatures draw lines.
You're finally going to get to the bottom of that birth certificate thing, aren't you?
You are welcome on my lawn.
How about we cut off the oxygen supply at the NSA HQ? After all, terrorists breathe oxygen too, and given the incompetence of the NSA, I'd be surprised if anybody in there WASN'T a terrorist.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I thought it was about "stopping voter fraud". What does any of that have to do with "voter fraud"? Why should a student not be allowed to vote at their school and still have a permanent residence with their parents?
Why don't you admit that you're just trying to make it harder for students to vote because they tend not to vote Republican? I mean, at least people might respect you a little bit if you were just honest about the purpose of these laws.
And by the way, I'm honored that you would register a brand spanking new Slashdot account just to respond to little old me. Are you part of the Red State Trike Force?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Agreed, If I were to rank threats to my freedom in order, the US government would rank a whole fucking lot higher than all of the world's terrorists combined.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
He has run an agency which routinely violates the fourth and fifth amendments. I'm talking about billions of felonies, every goddamned day.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."